Karen, think of our parents' generations. How hard it is to take car keys away from them, when they are really no longer fit for driving. I hope to live long enough to be chauffeured around by these self-driving cars!

The point is, more efficient and safe use of infratructure for personalized, private transportation. Which translates to fewer roads having to be built.

As much as people ballyhoo the wonders of public transportation, few people use it overall, and it's not often convenient either. Unless you live in downtown neighborhoods, public transportation doesn't take you to your door. It doesn't run always. It's mostly useful for commuting to work on normal daytime schedules. So truly autonomous cars would be like public transportation that takes you to your doorstep, is always there exactly when you need it, and uses roads much more efficiently than the vague, haphazrad, and random behavior of human drivers can ever do.

Cycling to work? So, you arrive at work and you take a shower? Or you go to a meeting and you take a shower? I had an office mate who rode his bike to work every day, and of course, no shower in the office. It's simply not practical.

Am I the only one not seeing the point of autonomous vehicles? It seems that we should be building better infrastructures for public transportation and cycling to work, than figuring out better ways to keep us all in our cars.

Wouldn't it be nice that when light turns gree all the cars in row start immediately instead of sping action where last car start way late then first car due to human response time. Also no honk to guys who sleeps or busy in texting while light turn green and you miss signal due to him... just that the article lead to wild imagination of world with fully automated cars :) Also cop cannot ticket car if found speeding (hope they dont issue SSn for cars :) )

In my opinion beside leagal infra structure, car security would be another big concern here. To kidnap someone, just launch visrus in cars software and done (I dont remember action movie name but something like this was shown). People are even concerned about having wifi/data sharing/location information uploading e.t.c. which are more or less needed for automation.

When the autonomous cars start running on the roads, it is not these cars that will create a safety hazard on the road but it is the mix of such cars along with the manually driven cars that will create some odd situations which the autonomous cars will not have been programmed for. Because the humans sometimes drive in totally unpredictable ways ( depending upon their mood, their mental stress level , their co-passengers and the alcohol level in their blood)

I think it's possible, as long as we don't extend that prediction to mean that these fully autonomous vehicles will be driving on fully autonomous mode all of the time. The roads will take time to be updated.

BTW, I mean 1950s, for freeways, not 1050s. (Of course, Roman roads many decades BC were superfreewys of sorts too.)

@Frank, that was exactly the initial reason why I decided that I need to look this into further. More stories on this topic -- breaking down the infrastructure development and actual deployment of actual autonomous cars -- will be coming soon....

The authors make an incredibly bold prediction -- that 75% of new cars worldwide will be Level 4 fully autonomous by 2035. There are a lot of roadway infrastructure investments needed as well as big innovations and cost reductions needed on the vehicle side, since by definition, if 75% of the world's new cars will be fully autonomous by that date, then they must also be very affordable by then too in order to reach that market share.

2035 is only 22 years away and it seems to me that we are already way behind schedule if this prediction is to come true.

True. So that's why fully autonomous driving will be deployed over time, only on certain roads and for certain vehicles initially. For example, we have High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes already today, on many suburban freeways. Those would become the first roads for these fully autonomous cars.

Think about how the freeway system began as recently as the 1050s, and how prevalent they have become today. And homo sapiens has roamed the planet for at least 40,000 years. What's a couple of decades?